Donald Trump, “the Pinocchio of politicians,” just told his biggest lie. Last week in an interview, he let loose with this whopper: “All I do is tell the truth.”
I heard that doozer during breakfast, choking on my toast while laughing.
It was the day after Trump informed us President Barack Hussein (Trump’s cynical emphasis) Obama and Hillary Clinton are co-founders of ISIS.
Trump’s trumplings keep insisting, “He tells it like it is.”
No, he doesn’t. He tells it like it isn’t.
For at least 13 months, Trump has been leaving a trail of lies and snake-oil promises behind him the way Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest.
Yes, Hillary has been known to lie, too. But on the Big-Fib Meter, Trump beats her hands down. A study by Politico, the fact-checking organization, found Trump has told lies about once every five minutes during 4.6 hours-worth of his speeches the fact-checkers analyzed.
Politico listed a tiny amount – just 101 of Trump’s most blatant lies. They include his lying that Obama was not born in America; lying that the 2016 Federal Omnibus Funding Bill pays for undocumented immigrants; lying that he’d never heard of Ku Klux Klan politician David Duke; lying that he never championed one-payer health-care systems when, in fact, he said in that first debate, “As far as single payer, it works in Canada; it works incredibly well in Scotland.”
One of his trademark tactics is he lies and then tells another lie, a softer lie, to cover up the previous lie, like a cat in a litter box covering its last stinky deposit. For example, on the Fox News Channel, Trump claimed he never accused President George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “I didn’t say lie,” he told the interviewer. “I said may have lied.” He pulled the same stunt when he claimed he knew for sure Hillary Clinton was sleeping soundly through the Benghazi crisis. Later, when called on it, he said, she might or could or might as well have been sleeping.
Yet another trademark Trumpism is when he transforms his narcissistic distortions of reality into “truths” that prove to be lies. Case in point: He denied reporter Michelle Fields was rudely handled by Trump’s former campaign manager at a Trump rally.
“This was, in my opinion, made up,” Trump said of the incident, “Everybody said nothing happened. Perhaps she made the story up. I think that’s what happened.”
When The Donald is caught in his lies, he blames the press. It’s all the media’s fault, of course. They report his lies, and then he throws a tantrum. How dare they?
And when he’s not outright lying, he spews big globs of misinformation, outlandish exaggerations or swaggering bluster – a big kid who hasn’t done his homework trying to bluff his way through an oral test. Like a naughty boy before a stern daddy, Trump not only lies, he repeats his lies rapid-fire as if repetition will make them true: “I love Mexicans. Incredible people. I really do, I really love them.”
If the Grand Fabricator isn’t telling his own lies, he’s repeating somebody else’s, knowing they’re not true or not caring if they’re true, like when he tried pathetically to give credence to a tabloid claim that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy.
Perhaps Trump’s biggest whopper is his claim that he is a conservative Republican. It’s causing earthquake tremors in the Republican Party as its members, in quickening panic, wait for the leopard to change its spots. Will a kinder, gentler Leopard Donald please step forward from his hard narcissistic shell? On the Ship of Trump, wise Republicans are grabbing for life rafts; the gullible will soon be sinking.
The scary thing about Trump the Egotist is this: Lies or misinformation? He doesn’t seem to know the difference or to care. He doubles down, then triples down, no matter what it is. Imagine that reckless fool in the White House. And now, God help us, Trump has become a prophet. He’s claiming if he loses the election, it will be due to voter fraud.
There was an old eccentric widow on my boyhood block who would tell us kids fanciful whoppers, and then she would always say, “May lightning strike me dead if I’m lying.” We kids would always do a mock-cringe and duck, ready for a streak of lightning to whip down and zap her, and (yikes!) maybe singe us too.
I always think of that old woman when Trump tells his lies. It wouldn’t surprise me if lightning zipped out of the sky and shocked some sense into the fib-filled braggart or turned him into a crispy critter.
This man is dangerous.
To borrow one of The Donald’s favorite adjectives, he’s “horrible.” Horrible. Trump is a horrible liar – just horrible.
Imagine that hothead as President Pinocchio.
Horrible.
